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Friday, April 3, 2015

What do Pet Rocks and handbags made from frog and anaconda skin have in common?

By Marc Jampole

Would you pay $17.23 for a smooth gray-colored stone that
could fit in your hand, something you could find at almost any municipal park
for free? That’s the equivalent value in today’s money of what people paid for
Pet Rocks in 1975. Of course, it came with a 32 page manual full of puns and
jokes about the rock.

Around the Christmas season in 1975, the Pet Rock first
became a media sensation, covered in newspapers and TV news shows all over the
country, and then a marketing fad as 1.5 million people plunked down $3.95
(plus tax, I assume) to buy one—for what purpose remains a mystery. Gag gifts?
Funny party favors? Conversation starters? Because neighbors bought one for
their grandchild? Unlike their later incarnation in virtual pets, which needed
to be “fed” and “cleaned” on a regular basis, the Pet Rock did nothing and demanded
no interaction. It just sat there, looking smooth.

Pet Rocks are in the news again—briefly—because their
creator, a formerly ne’er-do-well advertising writer named Gary Dahl, has died.

The Pet Rock came out during a time of abundance when we had
an historically large middle class and the smallest gap between the wealthy and
the poor in terms of wealth and income in American history. In 1975, someone making the federal minimum
wage of $2.10 would have to work 1.88 hours to buy one, net of all taxes. The
Pet Rock still sells today, but inflation has driven the cost for one up to $19.95,
which means that net of taxes, it takes someone earning the federal minimum
wage of $7.25 about 2.75 hours to pay for one. Interestingly enough, someone
earning the median household income in both 1975 and today would both work
about 47.5 minutes to pay for a Pet Rock, again net of taxes. (The median is
the point at which half the population is higher and half lower.)

If someone ran me through a word association test and
mentioned the Pet Rock, the words that might come to mind are useless,
frivolous, wasteful, stupid. It represents the frothy extreme of American
consumerism—something you can find anywhere for free and yet you buy it. The
Pet Rock takes to an absurd extreme the branding strategy by which you slap a catchy
or famous name onto a cheap product and jack up the price. The messages behind
the name supposedly imbue the product with greater worth—at least to unsavvy
consumers, a category that seems to include many of us. In the case of the Pet Rock,
the entire value is in the brand name, except for those who use their Pet Rocks
for door stops or to keep their papers from flying around when the window is
opened.

Coincidentally, the same day the news media reported the
death of Mr. Pet Rock, it also told us that Carlos Falchi, a designer of exotic
handbags, also met his demise. Falchi first made his name in the 1970’s and
1980’s selling exotic handbags patched together from the bits of skins of wild
animals—the list of his raw material in the NewYork Times obituary includes pieces of alligators, anacondas,
anteaters, buffalo, caiman, crocodiles and frogs, among others. Falchi handbags sell for thousands of
dollars at upscale department stores, but you can get cheaper versions from $20
to $300 on the Home Shopping Network or at Target.

The question of how a $30 bag differs from the $5,000 bag
involves a lot of variables, including materials. One Amazon seller is
currently offering a bag for $16.95 made of nylon and faux snakeskin; another
has one of the same material for $89.99. Meanwhile, Nieman Marcus is selling a
bag made of python and leather for $1,155. Most women and many men think they need
handbags, and Falchi has a version for everyone, no matter how much money they
earn. In fact, once you buy into the ideology of branding, buying a Falchi for
around $20 is an enormous value, because you’re toting what the rich folk tote.

The brand-name fashion item thus becomes a social leveler of
a peculiar sorts—it doesn’t level economic or social differences, just brand
buying patterns. Mick Jagger, Miles Davis and Andy Warhol carried Falchi bags
and so can the working Jane or Joe watching the Shopping Network. Celebrity
worship, which usually involves a preoccupation with what a celebrity buys and
uses, serves as a means to lessen the
perceived difference between rich and poor, thus helping to preserve social
order.

But whatever price one pays for a Falchi, it costs more than
it would without the fame of the Falchi name, without the back story of his
creating custom hand-sewn bags for cool people. I don’t know it for a fact, but
I’m extremely confident that the brand value of the Falchi name and myth adds much
more to the cost of the expensive bags than the entire price of the Pet Rock. I’m also confident that the cost to make the
cheap bags is about the same as the cost to find and package the Pet Rock, and
that both represent a small fraction of the sales price.

Thus Gary Dahl and the Carlos Falchi ( at least the one who expanded beyond making bags by himself for a handful of customers) were running the same exact scam, but on different audiences. Dahl went for the mass market and Falchi went for the wealthy, but both used the name to jack up the price beyond the value of the materials and labor needed to assemble the product. One could argue that the added value consisted of creativity, in the case of Dahl, his humor, and in the case of Falchi, his designs and selection of materials. But by the time the products rolled out in department stores, all this value had been reduced to the exhortation of a name: buy the smooth gray stone rock because of the name; buy the bag because of the name.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.